Six Degrees of Something
by Systemic Anomaly
Summary: Six chronological snapshots into the mind of Greg House: the lessons we take from life aren't always the ones life wants us to learn... or the ones other people want us to have.
1. I: Lollipop, Lollipop

**Title:** "Six Degrees of Something"  
**Word Count:** 3100 (total)  
**Rating:** T  
**Summary:** Six chronological snapshots into the mind of Greg House: the lessons we take from life aren't always the ones they want us to have.  
**Author's Notes:** Well. I'd originally intended this to be something a little more light-hearted, after the last few stories that I've posted. But once I got past the third section, it turned on me again -- you think I ought to get a leash and license for this thing, before it takes somebody's _fingers_ off? Eeeesh. But my dear Cinco read it through, and said it wasn't _awful_(I thought it was), and after two days of stewing in it, I finally finished it this morning. So. The choice is up to you.

* * *

_I._

Five years old, hot and crabby and bored; road-dust clinging to his worn-out sneakers and already tired of his toys. He'd wandered away from his house with no real idea of direction, thinking only vaguely that maybe he'd find some small treasure: he preferred those unusual finds, anyway, those odds and ends, to any toy soldiers or Erector set; preferred to take them -- a broken cog-wheel here, once an old abandoned fishing reel -- and put them together, imagine their origins, create worlds entire from the scraps other people left behind.

Thirsty, now, and just tired enough to turn back when a dark shape humped in the dusty road before him; his eyes widened, little feet slowing to a stop an almost reverent distance away. Run over by a car, most likely, whether skunk or raccoon it had ceased to matter at all -- and he squinted, creeping closer, watching its small heaving sides, the spray of whiskers and fur.

No car came down the road as he watched it, no roaring, sputtering engine to intrude on his fascination, and he didn't know how long it had been when the life simply left it; he saw it. Saw it fight for one last shuddering breath, saw the tremor that ran through it like an electrical current, and then... there was nothing. Something was _different_ about it, then, and even at five he could see that _living_ and _dead_ were nothing even close to alike. This tumbled heap of fur wouldn't scutter across a lawn, wouldn't bring back scavenged scraps for its young, and the emptiness inherent in its moveless hush made him wonder for the first time how such a thing could even be possible.

Here one minute. Dead the next.

He was too young to understand _forever,_ his perceptions too simple to look beyond that basic thought; but what puzzle might lie inside its inner workings, inside _his_ inner workings, whose pieces might add up to the answer to that question? What _made_ people dead, anyway? What made them alive, for that matter? And where was the place where they stopped being one and started being the other? Was there a place? Could you go there, and never come back?

He was uncharacteristically quiet at lunch; his mother clucked, his father absent, gone on maneuvers. As was already his way, he preferred to try and think about his own questions before he pestered a parent for answers. But he never forgot that sight, or the unformed fear it created. Somewhere out there, _someone_ had to know.

Why shouldn't it be him?


	2. II: Leader of the Pack

_II._

Eleven, and taller now; scrawny in the way of growing boys who care more about food as fuel than about the finer points of nutrition. Taller but it still didn't matter, because he was looking at the carpet weave in extreme close-up from across his father's knees as John House soundly paddled his only son's upturned, shorts-clad backside.

He was still too young for the wound to his pride to be greater than the sting to his bottom; and he supposed in his sulking way that he should have seen it coming.

Fifth grade, and again the new kid; like steps in a dance, like a formula that the universe finds so blackly amusing that it insists on repeating it over and over again. This time the beefy bully had been blond, blond and crew-cut and tall enough already at thirteen to terrify most of the younger kids. Greg had mostly managed to avoid him, old habits and the ability to be invisible when he needed to, but one muggy afternoon he'd found himself pushed too far and opened his mouth to retort. Words cut, he'd discovered already, words had a power that went beyond the sounds they made, and these particular words wound up having the power to result in the bully's fist pistoning sharp into Greg's still-talking mouth.

Picking himself up out of the dust, blood staining his new blue shirt, he'd let the laughter of the others drift over him, standing up and making sure he still _could_ as if this were nothing to disturb him at all. But those who wallow gleefully in their own wrongly-earned power are often oblivious... and the blond bully had been _quite_ oblivious when Greg had casually clocked him from behind with a fence picket.

In the ensuing scuffle of parents and shouting classmates his father had claimed him; the spanking, then, and well-deserved according to John. If you have to run your mouth, the logic went, then at least be man enough to stand up to the consequences and stand up to them fairly, not sneak around like a thief as soon as their back is turned. The lesson wasn't lost on Greg at all: it just wasn't the lesson his father had intended him to learn.

If you can't get them back in the open, he realized then, if they've got the jump on you then it's smarter not to slip up. Everybody's got a weakness, and sooner or later there'll be a way to exploit it. Evening a score was an art form, to be thought about and savored until it was as perfect as you could make it. And to do that, you had to pay attention. You had to notice things.

The next day John brought him home a punching bag. Greg mostly ignored it. He was busy plotting.

In the ensuing years to come, Dr. Philip Weber would never know what hit him.


	3. III: The Doors of Perception

_III._

His hair was longer, then, long enough to curl back into the collar of his shirt and he loathed dress shoes with a passion, preferring sneakers to all but the most formal of events. Like the ones he wore now, crossed in front of him on the concrete steps, and he had _time_ to sit and cross his ankles because he'd been kicked out of two classes in that time slot.

His mind, a constantly-turning still that took in information from every corner and distilled it into conclusions at an almost terrifying speed, was never satisfied with facile answers, with easy explanations. _Everything_ had an explanation, if you only put together all the facts, and he had a habit of pressing even the most lauded professors to the furthest edge of their patience. _Why?_ he'd ask, neat and calm in the middle row, his wiry athlete's legs sprawled easy beneath the too-short desk. _You took these facts and drew a conclusion. Fine. But what about the _other_ two conclusions that it's just as easy to draw? Do they not matter in your hypothetical reality?_

It didn't take him long to understand, even at the tender age of twenty-one, that most people who claimed to be 'seekers after knowledge' simply _stopped_ seeking once they knew enough to brag about. They didn't want to understand; they only wanted to reach that plateau of self-improvement and remain forever stunted to the truths that Greg House spent every moment craving details of. He was fascinated by the things that other people wrote off too-quickly as nonsensical; he was already infamous for taking an approach completely out of left field to get to the end of a process his classmates spent semesters trying to find the _beginning_ of.

_Genius is the ability to get from Point A to Point D without ever having to cross B and C,_ one of his professors had once told him, and when he came up with bizarre solutions like he always did they never knew whether to mark him highly or kick him out for breaking rules. Two of them had; one, red-faced and sputtering, who claimed it was because _You're not above the rest of us, Mr. House, and until you learn to follow the rules you're never going to gain any respect,_ but Greg himself was fairly certain that the man just hadn't been impressed with looking stupid.

None of them ever were, really. They needed to lighten up.

He learned, then, that while certain concepts were immutable -- like the laws of conservation, or the fact that body and brain needed oxygen to survive -- and for every fact there was an answer, _people_ were flawed little universes all unto themselves, subject to pride and greed and self-aggrandizement, and that what you saw on the surface was never the real reason that they did the things they did. Lying came as naturally as breathing to them -- for image, for money, for sex -- and it was a natural progression for Greg House to turn his gunsight eye on the things most other people missed. Later he'd be convinced that he'd lost his innocence, then, when all of childhood's assumptions were blasted away by the mortar shell of humanity's cheap and neon-gaudy reality.

An island unto himself, then; watching, learning. Observing. Rebuilding a picture with the colors of these lessons: stark, brutal, and more than a little disheartening. 


	4. IV: Living Dead Girl

_IV._

He really had met Stacy in a strip club; she'd gone there on a dare from some of her old college friends and he'd been toying with a screwdriver at the bar, only half his attention on poorly-lit gyrating women and sweaty crowds of horny men.

She'd been Stacy Childress then, dark sleek hair and a flush of red like rouge on her cheekbones when she'd sat down next to him at the bar and offered to buy his next round if he'd only spare her some intelligent conversation. He'd snorted into his glass but hadn't refused her request, and something about the Southern lilt of her voice and the way she talked with her hands made a small tight knot in his stomach uncoil. She was gorgeous, there was no doubt about that, and he'd felt the electricity between them even through the smoke and blue haze of the bar.

They wound up talking for the better part of two hours, work and med school and law school and who had the stupider friends; Stacy moving from water to seltzer to wine as he finished off his third screwdriver, and during one particularly heated exchange she'd laid her small warm hand on his wrist and just like that, he was lost.

She scared him a little, if the truth were to be told; she radiated passion in everything she did, be it career or leisure or sex. The first time, lying there afterward with her still half-draped over his hips, Greg had closed his eyes and tried to still the thrumming of his heart and wondered with something almost like terror: _Jesus, could this really be it?_

He pushed her buttons, made her think, she gave as good as she got and somewhere in between the night he'd kissed her on her doorstep and the afternoon they spent cross-legged on his floor amid a pile of debris, sorting her books and papers and trinkets from boxes(and he, refusing a few of them out of hand: _"I'm not having a pink elephant in a tutu on my bookshelf. God, I can _feel_ my testosterone leaking out of my ears as we speak."_), she'd gotten inside him, into him and beyond him, and for a little while he went around wondering if everything he thought he knew might be wrong. If Stacy Childress were the exception, the flaw in the rule, if maybe the disgusting majority might be stupid, sure, but maybe a few shining examples were left.

It was movies, and lazy Sunday afternoons spent lying in bed listening to the rain; it was throwing popcorn at the back of random theatergoers' heads until she was giggling and helpless and flushed. It was her small yet dexterous hands on his shoulders, unwinding the tension that his own hatred of the ignorant had wound in, it was listening to his ravings on the sick and unwashed masses and touching his lips and after five minutes, he couldn't help but smile. It was the way she looked at him when his brain was on fire with comprehension, mystery diagnosis and the thing he did best of all, and it was picnics in the rain and tennis and golf until the day he'd half-crumpled with a bolt of thick heavy pain in his thigh, and after that it hadn't really ever been anything anymore.  



	5. V: Practiced at the Art of Deception

_V._

They all said he hadn't changed after the infarction; up and down they swore that he'd _always_ been that way, that the leg was just a convenient excuse. But Greg House knew better than any of them what the _real_ truth of the situation was: he _had_ changed. He'd changed just as his life had changed... while all around him, everyone else continued undisturbed, happy little swirling pockets of sanity while he himself had been forced to re-build everything he'd thought he'd had.

Seeing the worst in people is an art form; it's all about paying attention and looking beyond the convenient status quo. But _hating_ people truly happens when you realize, finally, that _everyone's_ a hypocrite; everyone's got a price or a platitude. Everyone knows how you should live your life, what you should be grateful for, how hard it is for you and exactly _when_ it'll get easier.

None of these predictions were true.

In the end, _everybody_ was simply looking out for number one.

Patients lied because they were supposed to have been studying but in fact had been off having wild hot monkey sex with a girlfriend; patients lied because he'd been stepping out on his wife, because she'd been stepping out on her husband. They lied because they wanted to keep their jobs, because they wanted to _lose_ their jobs, because they wanted to live or wanted to die or to maintain a perfect image that was as fragile and easily shattered as the stained glass windows of their equally false devotions.

Parents lied to their children, doctors lied to their patients, Stacy Childress had lied when in those first hellish red-tinged days of tears and Vicodin she'd sworn she'd see it through, lied with that last _I love you,_ friends lied with _It gets easier_ and _Just give it time, Greg,_ and the world lied with every noxious, fume-choked breath; promising truth, promising happiness, promising everything but what you got: the real goddamn thing.

Imperfect.

Maimed.

Damaged.

And after a while, he learned to separate himself from them: from the mess, from the rat raze, the ever-present rattle of the vial in a pocket and the subtle isolation of his office. He learned that most doctors would never even _begin_ to grasp what may have been the basic truth of all of the practice of medicine: _Nothing_ is ever simple. _Everybody_ lies. And if they're dying on the outside, then it's a pretty safe fucking bet that there's _something_ rotting on the inside, to match.

Finding that, decoding it -- that's what he was _for._

As for the rest of them?

Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Go directly to Hell.

He'd make sure to save them a seat.


	6. VI: Short Skirt, Long Jacket

_VI._

One of those lazy summer afternoons, rain painting his windows in sheets of silver, and he was never really sure later just how he'd ended up in bed with Lisa Cuddy. But when he thought back to ask himself again, the question was not _Why?_ but _What the hell _took_ me so long?_

It seemed to House that she'd _always_ been there, just out of reach or of sight or of touch; his guilty conscience, ever-present reminder of better days. His mortal enemy, the clever by-the-book nemesis to his fly-by-night practice of medicine. While others retreated from him, cowed by his directionless fury and the blazing spark of intelligence, she, unintimidated, drew a line in the sand and then dared him to cross. And he had, in his way: an elbow here, a careless toe there; but even when the world was falling to pieces around and within him, he hadn't ever allowed himself to realize just how often she'd had his back.

If his blinded affair with Stacy had been a whirlwind then this, too, was a tempest; but the two were extremes of a sort that defied all comparison. _Who you are matters,_ he'd told her, and in the end that was the truth he learned from Cuddy: who you are really _does._

They'd both worked too hard, given up too much and were too old and jaded to put stock in the mass-marketed idea of romance... but sometimes, when he felt as if his leg were his whole world, a screaming winding biting agony of pain, when he loathed every boundary and spent every muscle's last oxygen just to shatter them on principle, the one who held him back was her. When he pushed the world too far, she pushed back. When he wanted someone to give, she knew he _needed_ someone to stand their ground.

And in the end, the words didn't matter, the _thoughts_ didn't matter, what the world may spit up around them mattered only as far as they let it. He tested her, made her think; she made him face head-on his assumptions. And so what, if they never touched: except for a brief fleeting brush in her office, his long fingers smoothing an errant strand of dark hair back behind her ear? She was a force of nature made flesh, driven and unyielding and nearly radiating with power, the kind that stopped the heart and warmed the blood. Their whispered, haunted moments, were a thing outside time. So what, if neither of them were perfect?

House learned then that it didn't matter all that much.

Someone out there, after all, was going to give her what she wanted. What she needed.

Why shouldn't it be him? 


End file.
